How a childhood crisscrossing regional Australia has shaped my crime novels

The Advertiser

24-05-2025

Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her.
The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months.
My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it.
We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended.
More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas.
Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books.
I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre?
There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works.
When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt.
One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap.
"Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW."
I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award.
There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice!
I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious.
I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places.
One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine.
My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood.
Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish.
I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways.
Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me.
I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home.
Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her.
The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months.
My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it.
We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended.
More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas.
Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books.
I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre?
There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works.
When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt.
One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap.
"Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW."
I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award.
There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice!
I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious.
I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places.
One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine.
My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood.
Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish.
I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways.
Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me.
I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home.
Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her.
The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months.
My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it.
We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended.
More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas.
Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books.
I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre?
There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works.
When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt.
One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap.
"Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW."
I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award.
There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice!
I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious.
I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places.
One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine.
My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood.
Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish.
I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways.
Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me.
I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home.
Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her.
The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months.
My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it.
We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended.
More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas.
Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books.
I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre?
There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works.
When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt.
One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap.
"Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW."
I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award.
There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice!
I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious.
I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places.
One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine.
My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood.
Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish.
I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways.
Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me.
I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home.